The Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy (which took over from the Department of Public Utilities) should be ashamed of itself.
Verizon public telephone charges $0.70 for a ONE MINUTE local telephone call. Now I have never been anything but cynical of corporate greed, but I kinda hoped the good Commonwealth would—as it has in the past—defend the common weal. This is the state in which the cost of a three minute call was regulated at ten cents, and each additional minute cost five cents. Of course that was before hundreds of millions were to be made selling cellphone contracts, cellphones, and digital bandwidth.
One, perhaps a naive one, might surmise that with all that added value, the loss which the phone company has historically absorbed in order to provide a service defined as necessary by statute, would become a less onerous public service for them to tolerate. And that was true.
Unless you look at it the way the phone company did. If payphones were plentiful and cheap, then the phone companies would have to work harder to sell the new services to us (cellphone contracts, cellphones, and digital bandwidth). They would have to make them so useful, and the cell networks so efficient that almost every dime-bearing payphone-user would prefer one.
Nah! It was much easier to just eliminate public payphones. With public payphones vanishing faster than snowmen in Spring, then the selling of cells would be easy, and they wouldn’t need to be particularly cheap, either. Furthermore, such a climate enfeebles the demand that a Public utility—like the cellular network—be regulated as a single, robust and dependable network. And as if it were not bad enough having a mishmash of networks each variously disinterested in the public good, lets further prevent the several cell networks, each with spotty coverage, from inter-operating transparently to eliminate dead spots.
Such a policy does two things: it increases profits, and as an uncared-about side effect, it decreases dependability.
Of course. It is the people who make the money who dictate now, not the people charged with preserving the commonweal. Most of them have left public service, anyway.